


With Every Piece of You

by orphan_account



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, i hope they give it to me, i really love lance x jemma brotp okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-09
Updated: 2015-10-09
Packaged: 2018-04-25 13:08:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4961776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Contains spoilers for 3x02 </p><p>“Hunter should talk to her,” Bobbi says, breaking the silence. </p><p>“Excuse me, what?” </p><p>Lance Hunter is the first one she really speaks to. Fitz has never been so grateful for anyone in his entire life (aside from Jemma). </p><p>A story of common ground and recovery.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Every Piece of You

Fitz is staring down at Jemma’s head in his lap when Bobbi enters the room. She leans softly on the doorway and smiles at him; he can’t help the beaming grin that he shoots back at her. 

“She needed comfort,” Bobbi observes quietly. Fitz nods, pleased to finally be the comfort Jemma needs. “She’s still got a shiv in her hand, though.” 

Fitz’s eyes widen and he leans over Jemma’s sleeping body to look for her hands. He sees that Bobbi is right. In her hand that isn’t attached to his thigh, Jemma holds a self-fashioned weapon of some kind. 

“Hunter should talk to her,” Bobbi says, breaking the silence. 

“Excuse me, what?” Fitz nearly yelps before remembering to keep his voice down. 

“He’s been through this,” Bobbi tells him, pointing at Jemma as she enters the room further. “He spent almost nine months abandoned in enemy territory, somewhere in the Russian tundra.” 

“Not exactly the same as another universe.” 

“No, but it’s closer than the rest of us have ever been,” Bobbi reminds him patiently. She’s learned how to deal with Fitz and his distinctly prickly tendencies, especially when it comes to his protectiveness of Jemma. “She’s a rockstar, Fitz, but she’s been through something that we can’t even begin to understand. We don’t know what happened to her there, but—“ 

“She was alone,” Fitz chokes out. “There was nothing else there.” 

“You were there for less than a minute. You don’t know what was there. She was gone for six months—I have a feeling she ran into something. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be holding that thing.” 

“We don’t even know where he is,” Fitz finally says after a tense moment of silence. Bobbi chuckles lowly. 

“You really think I let him leave without a subcutaneous tracker?” she asks in disbelief. She holds up her tablet and he sees a blinking red dot. “I know where he is probably better than he does.” 

Fitz lets out a bark of laughter, and suddenly Jemma is awake with a sharp gasp, holding out her weapon as she leaps to her feet. 

“Woah, woah,” Bobbi soothes. “Hey, Jemma, it’s just us. Sorry we woke you.” 

Fitz lets out a trembling breath and tentatively reaches out a hand toward her. 

“That was my fault,” he tells her. Her eyes are wild as they sweep around the room. She opens her chapped lips and then closes them again. 

“Real?” she manages to croak. Her voice is hoarse from disuse and dust. 

Fitz nods and she tentatively touches his hand, eyes shutting at the sensation of his touch. Her face seems to instantly calm, and her grip on her little weapon loosens—but she doesn’t put it down. 

“I’ll leave you two alone. Fitz, just…keep me posted.” 

He watches her go and then turns his attention back to the woman in front of him. 

“You need some more rest, Jemma,” Fitz says quietly. He tucks her back into the cot in the corner and resumes his position in the chair next to it. “Can I get you anything?” 

She shakes her head fervently, grasping his hand more tightly. He decides to rephrase the question. 

“Do you want me to have Bobbi bring some tea? I think being married to an Englishman taught her how to make it right.” 

Jemma’s lips quirk up slightly and it makes his heart race. She nods her assent and he smiles, typing a quick one-handed message on his device. They sit in silence for a while, and Jemma begins to cautiously trace his features with her fingertips. He nearly whimpers at the feeling; six months of desperation, of feeling like his world had ended, and now she’s back. She’s staring at him, awestruck, and he’s pretty sure he’s only seen her look at particularly interesting discoveries that way. 

Bobbi clears her throat in the doorway of the little pod that is now Jemma’s room. She hands them each a cup of tea. 

“One spoon of sugar and a splash of cream,” she says nervously. “I hope I remembered right.” 

Jemma nods and Bobbi grins, obviously relieved. Fitz takes a sip of his own tea and can’t help but sigh a little. Jemma smirks at him and then raises her own mug to her lips. As she swallows her first sip, her eyes suddenly fill with tears. 

“Oh, no,” Bobbi breathes. “Jemma, I’m sorry, I thought—“ 

She shakes her head as quickly as she can without spilling the hot drink in her hands. She’s sobbing but also smiling and Fitz can’t quite tell if the cries are turning into laughter or if laughter is morphing into tears. He puts his cup down to rub a soothing hand over Jemma’s back. 

“It’s been a long time, huh?” Bobbi asks softly. Jemma begins bobbing her head again. “We’ll start you out slow, I promise.” 

Jemma clutches her tea tighter, eyes widening. 

“I won’t take it,” Bobbi laughs, patting her leg. “We just need to ease you in to the comforts of Earth again.” 

Fitz shoots her a glare at the way that she cavalierly references Jemma being marooned on an alien planet in another universe, but then he sees that Jemma’s face is clear of tears and he’s fine with it. 

Bobbi leaves them alone again, and Jemma doesn’t speak. 

He finds Bobbi in the common area, just as he expected. Jemma had fallen asleep, and he’d stuck Daisy with her while he chatted with his second favorite biologist. 

“Call him back,” Fitz grudgingly admits. “She won’t—she can’t—I think she needs to hear from someone that can understand. I don’t think she wants to talk yet but maybe she can—she can listen.” 

Bobbi gets up, squeezing his shoulder as she dials her phone and heads into the hallway for privacy. 

Hunter is back at the Playground the next morning. 

*** 

Jemma looks surprised when he throws himself into the chair next to her cot. She’s scrolling through a tablet, looking at Fitz’s research on the monolith. He hasn’t changed his password since the Academy—she’d need to talk to him about that, given their entire organization had been infiltrated. When she could talk, that is. 

“My favorite science princess,” Hunter greets. “Don’t tell Bob.” 

She gives him a little look, part amused and part threatening, and he grins at her before becoming suddenly solemn. 

“She called me back. I’ve been hunting down Ward, trying to make sure that guy doesn’t hurt anyone ever again.” 

Her face whips to him, and she looks incredibly pained. He remembers his conversation with Daisy and then with Fitz, about how Jemma had truly wanted to kill the man who’d nearly killed the woman he loved. He and Jemma have more in common than he’d originally anticipated. He decides to tell her so.

“We’ve got more in common than you’d think, love. We’re both from England, Ward tried to kill the people most important to us in the world—and we’ve both been stranded for months on end in an unfamiliar landscape, all on our little lonesome.”

He winces at his own description and he notices that she’s watching him very carefully. He takes a deep breath and stares at his hands. 

“When I was in the SAS, I was on a mission—got abandoned in enemy territory, stuck in the Russian tundra. For eight months.” 

She leans forward toward him, eyes sparked with interest and a guarded kind of empathy. 

“There’s a reason why nobody ever managed to invade that bloody place in the winter. I spent eight entire months by myself. Not a single human in sight, no fucking idea where I was. Then winter was coming, and the wolves got desperate. Started trying to track me and eat me as the other meat was dwindling.” 

Jemma lets out a shaking sigh and nods vigorously. Bobbi’s thoughts had been correct—something had obviously hunted her.

“Bobbi didn’t give up on trying to find me. We were separated, then, but not divorced yet. Sometime I wonder if—“ 

He trails off. Jemma doesn’t need to hear about how he’s always wondered if his trauma is what put the nail in their marital coffin. Besides, they’re happy now. He wants the same for FitzSimmons. 

“Anyway, she didn’t give up. She was SHIELD, even back then, but they didn’t give up many resources, and SAS couldn’t spare them either. So she tracked down Izzy. She was already dead when you returned from Hydra, but Izzy and Idaho and the ragtag team she threw together—they’re the ones who eventually got me out. Bobbi was torn up that she wasn’t on that rescue mission, but I was a little glad, if I’m honest. I wouldn’t have known how to react to her.” 

She nods slowly in understanding and, to his shock, darts a hand out to his arm and squeezes it tightly. 

“I didn’t talk for a while. Same as you. I hadn’t used my voice in ages. For a while there, I suspected that I’d forgotten how to read. You’re too smart for that, of course.” 

She lets out a breath of laughter and it warms him. He continues on as he sees her further relaxing. 

“Took me a while to eat solid foods, too. I’m not sure what your food and water supplies were like wherever the hell you were. I was mostly okay until the winter. I took a page out of the bears’ book, built myself a little cave of sorts but it still wasn’t enough—I hadn’t spent months fattening up. I’m lucky that I made it. I probably wouldn’t have made it a day longer if Izzy hadn’t found me when she did.” 

Jemma licks at her chapped lips with a furrowed brow and he wonders how far gone she had been, too. 

“It’s just—I know this is hard. I know that it’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done, and I also know that you’ve done some really hard shit, Simmons. So just—know this, okay? It gets better. You have to believe that. It gets easier and easier, and all these little pieces of who used to be will start to fall back into place. You might get a chance to re-examine some, choose which ones you want to throw away and which ones you want to keep.” 

Her entire body relaxes, almost like jello, and then she throws herself at him, wrapping her arms tightly around his shoulders. He slowly brings his own hands up to wrap around her, and when he looks up from her shoulder, he sees Bobbi and Fitz through the window. Both of them look glassy-eyed, but Bobbi is smiling so hard he thinks her face might break. Fitz, on the other hand, looks far more serious. He waves them away with one hand, wanting Jemma to have her privacy. 

He’s glad that he did, because when she pulls away and scoots back onto her little bed, she wraps her arms around her knees and looks at him with pleading brown eyes. 

“I’m ready to talk,” she croaks. Her voice cracks and he’s not sure if it’s nerves or lack of use or both. “But just—just to you. If that’s okay.” 

“That’s fine, princess. Where do you want to start?” 

And she tells him everything. From being spit out onto that blue planet, trying to gain her bearings. How she marked the days on a specific piece of sandstone only to have the entire thing blown away in a storm after 44 days. She had kept track of the stars, tried to make her own taxonomy of the plants that she found. She told him about the time she ate something poisonous and spent five entire days hallucinating horrendous things. She told him about the Hellhounds, chasing her from one side of the planet to the other. There was no water but there was something else, and she tells him how she regrets not getting a sample to bring back to Earth with her. She’s dying to know what it was but at the same time, she doesn’t want to. Obviously it was similar enough to keep her alive, though. 

She’s lost a lot of weight, he notices, and she tells him how she eventually had to learn to hunt small reptilian creatures that tasted like rubber. She explains that she cried like a baby the first time she killed one. She wasn’t able to make fire so she ate it raw and it took her nearly a month to get used to the taste. Now, she’s uncertain what to eat. She fears meals and food. 

She tells him about crying into her tea and it’s the only time he interrupts her, to tell her that he did the same thing. Something about the comfort of a mug of tea had been the thing to break through the walls of his trauma and she squeezes his hands in gratitude. 

“I knew he was coming,” Jemma admits, playing with the hem of her pants. 

“He wouldn’t give up,” Lance agrees. “And nobody wanted to, Simmons, you need to know that. Daisy locked herself in her room for days when we finally started to think that maybe you were just—gone.” 

Jemma looks confused. “Daisy?” 

“Skye,” Hunter snorts. “She changed her name.” 

Jemma bites her lip and holds back tears. “A lot has changed. I don’t know how I fit.” 

“None of us do,” he reminds her gently. “Bobbi is in the lab now. I’m off in an unlikely partnership with Melinda May. Coulson has no left hand, Mack is working with the Inhumans—we’re all out of sorts. We’re all out of our league.” 

“Fitz,” Jemma breathes. “That’s where I go.” 

He gives her a little smile and nods. “Probably, yeah. You’re strong, Simmons. You’re going to get through this.” 

“How did you—um, the bed—it’s too soft. And blankets, they feel like they’re suffocating me.” 

“I slept on the floor with no blankets for about a week. Then I moved to a mattress. Took me almost a month to be able to use a blanket though.” 

“And, um, what about—sounds?” 

“Everything’s real loud, isn’t it?” he empathizes. She nods vigorously and he nearly laughs at how much she looks like a little bobblehead. “You know, music actually really helped me. It helped me drown out all the sounds. And some of the words, y’know, just helped me process.” 

“That—that makes sense.” 

“Let me make you a mix,” he says, patting her hand. “I’ve got some good ones.” 

She smiles lightly and brushes at the tears that linger on her face after her long confessional. 

“Want me to get Fitz?” Hunter asks kindly. 

“Yes, please.” 

“Always so polite, Sheffield.” 

He ruffles her hair and then leaves, and she feels inexplicably lighter. Now that she’s said it all, gotten it all out, talked to someone who can kind of understand—maybe now it will start to get better. 

Fitz returns, a little winded and looking like he’d run through the base. She finally notices his clothes and vaguely remembers how he’d been dressed when he pulled her through the portal. 

“Did you go shopping?” she blurts out. She winces when she says it, sure that it’s not what she wanted to say to him after so long of not speaking. 

Fitz nearly doubles over in laughter. “Some of the stuff I was doing—Bobbi said I had to look more—presentable.” 

Jemma laughs a little too, and then she holds up the tablet. 

“I’ve got some questions about your research.” 

He groans. “How the hell did you get in there?” 

“It’s not my fault you’ve had the same password since you were 17, Fitz! GlasgowMonkey6point022? We were invaded, for God’s sake.” 

He rolls his eyes and snatches it out of her hand, peeking at the document on it. “What do you have questions about?” 

She begins rattling off a series of questions so quickly that he can hardly believe this is the same woman who would barely speak just an hour before. Whatever her and Hunter had talked about, it had obviously helped. Now he was going to have to talk the other man into sticking around for a while.” 

Hunter comes back in an hour with an iPod and a pair of headphones. She beams at him and scrolls through a playlist, part curious and part satisfied. He gives her a little kiss on the cheek and leaves again, and Fitz takes the hint. 

“I’m gonna go make you some more tea and one of those god awful shakes that Bobbi has you drinking. As soon as you can eat solid foods, I’ll try to make your famous sandwich.” 

She squeezes his hand and then eagerly puts in the earbuds, effectively tuning him out. He smiles affectionately and takes off toward the kitchen. 

“Hey,” he tells Hunter, who sits at the breakfast bar with a bag of chips and a beer. “Thanks for—whatever you said to her. It’s like night and day.” 

The other man takes a long sip from his bottle. “She just needed someone who can understand. Stick with her, mate, yeah?” 

Fitz looks at him like he’s crazy, and Hunter claps him on the shoulder. 

“She needs you. She needs everyone, but especially you.” 

Then he’s gone again, and Fitz busies himself with combining all the powders and water and ice that Bobbi taught him how to do. He sniffs it and scrunches his face in disgust before shaking his head and sticking a straw in it for Jemma. 

“Poor thing,” he mumbles. “So disgusting.” 

When he returns to her bunk, she’s got her eyes shut and her foot vaguely taps to the music in her headphones. She seems to sense him there and her eyes are a little watery, but she accepts the smoothie and offers him an earbud. 

He sits beside her and takes it, letting the music take him to where she is. She slips one hand into his and he gives it a gently squeeze. She starts to drift off and he urges her to finish her smoothie despite her obvious distaste for it. As soon as she finishes it, he places it on the little table beside her cot and she curls up into his side. When he tries to remove her headphone, she huffs and yanks it back. 

“Alright, then, you can keep it.” 

“Goodnight, Fitz,” she murmurs into his chest. He places a light kiss into her hair and feels her shiver. For a moment, he panics, but then she squeezes into him tighter. 

“I knew you were coming,” she whispers. 

“There was no other option.” 

“I missed you.” 

“I missed you too.” 

“I’ll—I’ll tell you all about it, what it was like there, just not—“ 

“Shh,” he soothes. “Don’t worry about any of that, alright? It’s time to rest now.” 

She hums lightly and he feels her lips press into his collarbone before she becomes significantly more heavy. He reaches for his tablet on her other side and settles down with the research he’s missed with what Bobbi calls his Jemma blinders on. 

He looks down at her and feels his chest fill with warmth at the reminder that she’s alive and with him and whatever they’re going to be, they can build it together. 

He also realizes that he’s never been so grateful for Lance Hunter in his life.


End file.
